The concept of urban hibernation: Scientific note

This scientific note aims to briefly introduce the concept of urban hibernation, published recently (September 2015) in an article with the same name in European Planning Studies (Routledge). By outlining some general characteristics, the purpose of this note is merely to put the reader’s attention to this concept, whom we remit to the original article for a comprehensive walk-through. The reason for including this note in the book is its strong association with the concepts of degradation and restitution, to which the concept of urban hibernation offers a novel explanatory lens. Given the hitherto overly descriptive, undertheorized and confirmative character of studies on degraded and restituted towns, the concept of hibernation is a first attempt to capture degradation and restitution through the use of a coherent theoretical framework.